Building a working-class party
By Deirdre Griswold
From a talk at the Sept. 21-22 Workers World Party
conference.
In China there is an ongoing debate and struggle over
whether the bourgeois elements, the "entrepreneurs," should be
allowed to join the Communist Party.
Capitalist development in China has gone very far, but the
CP is still the ruling party. It has changed very much since
the death of Mao Zedong, but it has preserved elements of
socialist planning and ownership that the bourgeoisie wants to
do away with.
If the Chinese CP were to decide that you cannot be a
capitalist and a communist at the same time, we would regard
that as a victory for the left, a step back from the direction
in which China has been moving ever since Deng Xiaoping.
There was a time when many groups and parties here followed
China's lead. They were inspired by its defense of Marxism and
the revolutionary struggles in the Third World during the
1960s, when the leaders of the Soviet Union were promoting
peaceful coexistence of the two social systems, socialism and
capitalism.
It should be very clear now that this revision of basic
Leninism by the Soviet CP, this abandoning of the communist
view on the irreconcilable character of the two social systems,
contributed to the downfall of the USSR. The idea that
capitalism and socialism were "converging" was false. In fact,
they were in mortal struggle, something the imperialists always
understood.
We were among the first to hail China's efforts to return to
the revolutionary essence of Marxism and Leninism. But unlike
the other groups here, we didn't just adopt all the slogans and
views of the Chinese party as our own.
I raise this in connection with our own efforts to build a
revolutionary Marxist and Leninist party based in the working
class in the U.S. Our focus is on finding those workers who are
the clearest and most resolute about fighting this system and
all its reactionary manifestations. We recognize that the most
oppressed sectors of our class--those with the least to lose
and the most to gain from breaking the chains of
oppression--will be the strongest fighters for social
change.
But what about people who come from other social classes?
Can they be members of our party?
A party of workers
I think we in the United States have the least to fear from
this question--both because the working class is the most
numerous class and because the workers here, certainly by
comparison to many earlier revolutions, have the skills to be
the leaders of their own struggle. They do not have to rely on
literate and skilled people from other classes to bring this
knowledge to them. Certainly not in the same degree as was true
in the Russian or Chinese or other revolutions where the
workers were a small minority in society, where few could even
read or write.
Our party reflects a different reality. We ARE a party of
workers. And we strive every day to become more representative
of the multinational working class in this country.
And overwhelmingly, it is those who directly feel the whip
of reaction and exploitation who are attracted to WWP.
Certainly, the bourgeoisie is not breaking down the doors
asking to join our party.
In China, the problem is that the party is in control of the
state and runs society. Having someone from the new bourgeoisie
in the party means they will inevitably bring bourgeois
influence into the decisions made by the state. They are not
joining the party to fight against a bourgeois government. They
are joining to try to undermine what remains of a workers' and
peasants' government.
Our party does not wield state power. Our aim is to liberate
this society from capitalism by helping create a workers' state
to replace the capitalist state. That, by the way, is one of
the essential features of a socialist revolution: the
appearance of new structures, developed by the masses
themselves, that begin to contend for power with the old state
apparatus. It is the job of revolutionaries to encourage these
bodies to exercise the authority that the workers have given
them and take the power.
If someone who comes from another class truly understands
this and wants to join us, that means they have betrayed their
class origins and joined the struggle of the workers.
Can someone truly betray their class origins and
ideologically join forces with a contending class? It doesn't
happen often, but there are notable examples. Frederick Engels
was a manufacturer's son and continued in the family business,
although he hated it, so he could help finance Karl Marx's
monumental work in developing socialist theory--both in
breaking from bourgeois philosophy and in analyzing capitalist
political economy.
There is no opportunist reason for joining Workers World
Party. We have nothing to offer but hard work, dedication,
self-sacrifice and the joy of knowing you are helping to create
a just world for everyone.
This is a period when the dual crisis of imperialist war and
economic chaos is shaking up many people. There is already a
movement of people from across the class spectrum who are
dismayed at the wholesale destruction of the environment caused
by unplanned, profit-driven exploitation of the world's natural
resources.
It is a task of the revolutionary working class party to
reach everyone with our socialist message, to make them
understand that their energies will be most effective when they
recognize the pivotal role of the workers in changing society.
For years there have been thousands of organizations here that
lobby politicians and appeal to the corporations to make
reforms, to agree to forgo a small portion of their profits in
the interests of the social good.
But the class struggle is heating up and those methods bear
little fruit. Lobbying won't prevent mass layoffs or
imperialist war or the hideous effects of global warming.
Capitalism is moving more and more into a crisis mode that will
bring out resistance from the workers. It's more important than
ever that we build this party, which has understood so
correctly the world relationship of class forces, and provide
clear Marxist leadership in the stormy days to come.
Reprinted from the Oct. 24, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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